Tariffs, Temu, and Tech: The Amazon Stock Story in 2025 (AMZN)

Deep Research About Stocks with Alex Ledger and Kate Bullard

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) remains one of the most powerful and multifaceted companies in the world. Best known for its massive online retail presence and Prime delivery network, Amazon is also a leader in cloud computing (Amazon Web Services), logistics infrastructure, digital advertising, and AI innovation. As of 2025, the company sits at a pivotal moment—balancing growth in emerging sectors with external challenges including trade tensions, rising costs, and shifting global supply chains.

In this episode of Deep Research About Stocks, we go beyond the surface and explore how recent developments—particularly renewed U.S.–China tariffs—are impacting Amazon’s business model, profit margins, and stock performance. The episode provides listeners with a detailed analysis of the company’s current fundamentals and outlines both the bullish and bearish investment cases for Amazon moving forward.

As of March 2025, Amazon’s stock is trading around $195 per share, down approximately 11% year-to-date. The stock reached a high of $242 in February 2025 but has pulled back following a series of tariff announcements that have reintroduced cost pressures across Amazon’s e-commerce supply chain. These tariffs, implemented in early 2025, added an additional 20% in import taxes on a broad range of goods coming from China—many of which Amazon sells either directly (first-party) or via its massive third-party marketplace.

Why does this matter? Because Amazon sources a significant portion of its inventory from China. Analysts estimate that roughly 25% of Amazon’s first-party cost of goods sold originates from Chinese suppliers, and nearly half of Amazon’s top marketplace sellers are China-based. These new tariffs represent a material cost increase on a broad swath of Amazon’s inventory—from electronics to home goods to apparel.

As a result, Amazon faces difficult choices: either absorb these higher costs and squeeze its margins further, or pass them onto consumers through price increases—something that could impact demand and customer satisfaction. In this episode, we analyze how Amazon is currently managing that balance, and how its scale, logistics network, and technology investments help insulate it from some of these challenges.

We also explore how these trade dynamics are shaping competition in e-commerce. In particular, we highlight Amazon’s growing rivalry with low-cost Chinese platforms like Temu and Shein—two companies that have gained U.S. market share by using direct-to-consumer shipping models and leveraging customs loopholes like the de minimis exemption. Although recent U.S. trade policy paused efforts to end that loophole, Amazon is responding with its own low-cost marketplace initiative and lobbying efforts to level the playing field.

Beyond tariffs, we also break down Amazon’s broader growth story. AWS (Amazon Web Services) continues to be a key profit driver, with high margins and significant market leadership in cloud infrastructure. Amazon’s advertising division is another high-growth, high-margin engine. And the company is making major capital investments in AI technology—spanning everything from fulfillment optimization to generative AI capabilities for its AWS customers.